Linus Torvalds:"Funnily enough, the only distributions I tend to refuse to touch are the "technical" ones, so I've never run Debian, because as far as I'm concerned, the whole and only point of a distribution is to make it easy to install (so that I can then get to the part I care about, namely the kernel), so Debian or one of the 'compile everything by hand' ones simply weren't interesting to me."

I guess that "easy to install" is a relative thing - just about any Linux distribution available now is easier to install now than the various distributions which were around even a few years ago, especially since hardware detection and setup has improved so much. Also, if you're talking about installing an OS + drivers + applications, Linux is much easier than Windows, at least in my experience. I would add that tweaking, configuring, that sort of thing is something that some people actually enjoy, and since Linus did say "... as far as I'm concerned," that's just his personal taste.

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"I'm doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won't be big and professional like gnu) for 386(486) AT clones." - Linus Torvalds, April 1991

I guess that "easy to install" is a relative thing - just about any Linux distribution available now is easier to install now than the various distributions which were around even a few years ago, especially since hardware detection and setup has improved so much. Also, if you're talking about installing an OS + drivers + applications, Linux is much easier than Windows, at least in my experience. I would add that tweaking, configuring, that sort of thing is something that some people actually enjoy, and since Linus did say "... as far as I'm concerned," that's just his personal taste.

I was a bit surprised that Linus would opt for a bigger heavily patched distro. Does he swap out the kernel with a vanilla one or what? I thought he might be more of a purist. But I suppose he doesn't have the time to tweak a install to get it running. It's the kernel and nothing but the kernel for him.

I was a bit surprised that Linus would opt for a bigger heavily patched distro. Does he swap out the kernel with a vanilla one or what? I thought he might be more of a purist. But I suppose he doesn't have the time to tweak a install to get it running. It's the kernel and nothing but the kernel for him.

I think Linus likes to be polemic and to say whatever people is not expecting from him.I found polemic and interesting the open source vs free software topic. Linus is probably right about the more pragmatic focus of the open software as a development model was very good to linux. But I think both points of view are not incompatible and can live together. Open software development has an ethical edge even when this is not the original intention. For example, the kernel itself is developed under the "open source philosophy" with no reference to "Freedom" but it is used by the free software movement and, even when was not the original intention, it has a political and ethical function in this world.

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"There is a concept which corrupts and upsets all others. I refer not to Evil, whose limited realm is that of ethics; I refer to the infinite."Jorge Luis Borges, Avatars of the Tortoise. --Jumalauta!!